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If you want my more general game review thoughts, I’ve put them after. Skip down. This will have spoilers. Can’t avoid it.
To analyze the story of the Wolverine game, the first thing I want to do is actually strip all of the IP away. That’s going to let us examine the story itself without being bogged down by preconceived notions of who these characters are and what the setting is. Then we can bring those back in afterward.
I don’t typically like reducing a character design to “female” vs “male” gaze. It overly simplifies the concept. However, I do feel like Logan in this game presents with an interesting combination of traits that pulls from both ends of this hypothetical spectrum of stereotypical attributes. He’s strong, but he’s small. He’s hairy and presumably smelly, but he has this very kind of soft, open, emotional face. He’s still very much a grumpy loner, but he doesn’t sink too far into that single note of character.
If we’re trying to draw up harder character archetypes, he still fits in that standard comic book anti-hero role. This is also a version of Logan, however, that could also pass for a genre romance lead. He falls into that role of tough guy on the surface that is soft and gentle only one layer deep. And while rage and anger are very strong motivating factors, he has a high enough emotional intelligence to explore that sorrow underneath.
It’s his contrast with Jean that really adds that extra complexity and depth because she is also motivated by rage. She’s a female romantic lead in an action game that’s allowed to be mad as hell in her own right. That’s allowed to have a different set of priorities that are in direct, active conflict with his. And despite the evergreen complaints about Mary Jane, I think that’s something Insomniac did fairly well in the Spider-Man games, as well.
So while this is technically a male0led story, it is sharing a significant amount of its forward momentum with a strong female co-lead. She saves him. He saves her. They save each other. They work together. And while too much of it happens off screen because they cut her playable portions, Jean handles her own business. She’s not narratively relegated to just the romantic interest or put in a position where all of her actions are just functions of Logan’s decisions.
This dichotomy between the characters also plays out in the grander themes of the story. The big through-line is living in a chosen family.
Jean is the leader and primary matriarchal figure of her found family. It’s people she’s brought together to provide hope and comfort. When a member of that family is killed, it’s a devastating loss that ripples out to everyone. It becomes the thing she holds on to. Keeping her family safe and together.
Logan is also the member of a chosen family, but he’s the prodigal son. His family is in this perpetual state of falling apart. And by the end of the game, they’ve completely and totally dissolved. And while ultimatey it was the betrayal of their patriarchal figure, it’s Logan himself who ends up being the physical vehicle through which his family is torn apart. He’s not presented with a choice in the matter, and eventually has to face that this family was never really a family to begin with.
So these two approaches to the chosen family end up being a conceptual foil to one another and inform how Jean versus Logan react to the events of the story.
And these are fleshed out with some additional little story beats with Victor and Raven.
Raven has created two chosen families, one with the X-team and one with her wife. (Let’s also give a shout out for an emotionally complex sapphic relationship.) And her work family has put her at odds with her married family. She has to reconcile her personal ideologies with whom she owes loyalty to.
Victor spends the story craving this chosen family that we learn doesn’t really exist. He’s driven by this deep fraternal longing. When all of that is eventually stripped away, the first thing he does is seek out a new platonic partnership to belong to. In the context of this specific story, Victor is looking for an anchor that he keeps losing. So while he’s still very monstrous (not as much as his comic counterpart) there’s a sadness there, as well. Something that (like the comics) mirrors what Logan’s also going through.
And none of these things are particularly subtle. Pair them with a pretty streamlined A to B to C plot, though, and the combination forms a great foundation for a fast-paced action story. It also leaves space for a well constructed, if simple, bittersweet romance story between Jean and Logan. Reincarnation has made Jean this phantom that’s been haunting Logan’s life. They finally pierce the veil and form a life together, just to have it ripped away from them. They get a second chance to find that mooring and have to make the choice to destroy it again. It’s very sad and leaves this tinge of hope at the end…that almost makes it more sad.
While it gets a little cluttered at the end, I think it’s all very charming and not overly wrought.
Now here’s the problem. We have to take all of this and put IP back on top of it.
Because while I find Raven’s conflict with Logan and Nathan and her wife Tiger all extremely compelling, I found myself feeling some cognitive resistance to her narrative position. I had to decide “do I feel like Mystique would act this way and which direction do I prefer?”
On the other hand, I think the Sabretooth in this story is way more interesting than the rapist murderer that the comics draw up. But if they ever want to get to that version from this version, that is a lot of work to put in. I think they can do it, but I’d like to actually see it as opposed to it being off screen.
And we have a story with Sabretooth and Mystique working in close proximity that ends on a note of anti-mutant sentiment. It feels like a missed opportunity to do something with Graydon Creed. I don’t know what that would be, but I have to admit an amount of chagrin at seeing all these pieces so close to each other but never connecting. Mystique-Sabretooth-Wolverine is the three-way from hell, and I think it would have been fun to have just a little bit of that in there.
I also keep thinking about my reactions to Mystique in this game versus my reaction to Mystique in the live action X-Men movies. In Rebecca Romijn’s portrayal, she’s extraordinarily competent, but she’s not given the space to be the same level of villain or antagonist as Magneto is. A role she does occasionally fill in the comics. Overall, I don’t overly dislike that version of her, I just think she could have been a larger threat independent of her partnership with Magneto.
I hate the Jennifer Lawrence portrayal of the character. Nothing to do with Lawrence’s performance whatsoever. Outside of Days of Future Past, I feel the writers shoved Mystique into a role where her primary purpose was just to be in service to a bunch of men with stronger ideologies from her. It’s a character I would have been annoyed by agnostic of the presence of a pre-existing IP. The fact that it was meant to be Mystique just made it more annoying. In that switch from villain to hero, they stripped away too much of her independence.
But then despite my minor misgivings, I don’t have that same level of negative reaction to Mystique in this game. And I think that’s because they threaded the needle a little bit better.
You want Mystique as a protagonist? OK. Cool. What are the circumstances where her more common character traits would read as protagonistic? Then the game presents a world where mutants aren’t in strong numbers, but then there’s this one guy trying to fix that. Those are circumstances that I can see a version of Mystique joining up with a team, especially if it meant she got to go after someone like Trask. By the end of the game, we see more of that “traditional” self-serving, mutant-first Mystique emerges.
So all the secondarycharacters, morlocks included, read as early-career versions of their characters. They haven’t had their heel-turn or gone through the full-gauntlet of traumatic experiences that we’ve come to associate with them. Which in a broad sense, is fine. You’re not born villainous or traumatized, so having that peek behind the curtain can bring a new dimensionality to a character. The game is just too compact to explore these things to the degree I think they deserve, particularly when we don’t know if we’re getting more games in this vein.
For Logan and Jean, I feel as though they’re pretty faithful to the source material as individual characters. In terms of median personality, Logan reads a little softer, but then that also really depends on if you’recitng his solo books, his team books, or his girl-dad books. Ge gets explored from a lot of different angles depending on who they’re trying to appeal to in that moment.
So then it’s matter of the Logan-Jean romantic relationship. In terms of source material, I don’t ship Jean and Logan. At the same time, I don’t know that I earnestly ship anyone with Jean and Logan. Gun to my head, I think I prefer Scott x Emma or Scott x Bowl of Soup. And in my fan fiction, I’ve only ever paired Wolverine up with either Morph or Deadpool, and that’s mostly for comedic effect. If I had to pick a canon coupling for Logan, it’d be Storm or Hercules. Maybe Domino for laughs.
In this game though, with these versions of the characters, I really like Jean and Logan together. And I think it works because Jean’s a matriarchal figure in this story. Within the source material, despite them all being adults eventually, Wolverine feels like he sits in this older coworker role that never turns over into filial. It’s stuck in this weird liminal space around age-based power dynamics. Compared to his relationship with Jubilee or Kitty Pryde, which are a lot more dad-coded.
In this game, despite still having that massive technical age gap, they start with a much closer intellectual and emotional age. So that transition into the romantic is just two grown adults who are attracted to each other and doesn’t have the same friction or gooeyness.
This more mature version of their relationship works in tandem with the underlying reincarnation storyline featuring Apocalypse and Phoenix as cosmic mirrors. Reincarnation is certainly not thematically foreign for Jean. In terms of the change to some of the Apocalypse lore re: Wolverine and the Pheonix force, I kind of just don’t care. Because comics themselves rework their own lore all the time.
But not everyone is going to have my more laissez-fairs relationship with the pre-existing lore.
Wolverine, as an IP game, has to balance the same thing every other adaptation has to: telling an interesting story all its while remaining faithful to fan expectations. But both gaming and comic communities are famously prone to taking minor grievances and mimetically proliferating them to the point that they overtake the critical conversation. This game is no exception.
So suddenly, IP creators and IP fans are unintentionally forced into this conceptual negotiation around canon compliance that doesn’t have a consistent outcome. No one who plays Marvel Rivals cares at all that half their lore is invented whole-cloth just for the game. Yet I’ve seen multiple conversations in the last week about whether a single Sabretooth line is out of character and/or cringe. And that discussion would be fine if it was always made in good faith and wasn’t consistently being cited as an objective indicator of writing quality (which it isn’t by sheer virtue of being up for discussion).
One of the hard truths a lot of comic readers struggle with is that comic character continuity has natural fluidty to it. They aren’t a discrete, unchanging, immovable figure. Rather, they are trend lines through a word cloud.
If you say I want a comic-accurate Sabretooth OK. Cool. Which comic? When he was an Iron Fist villain. When he fell in love with a woman and decided he wanted to leave his life of violence behind just for it to end in tragedy. The other time he fell in love with a woman and decided he wanted to leave his life of violence behind just for it to end in tragedy. Those few years post-AXIS where he never reverted moralities, so he tried to go around making amends. That time he was on an Avenger squad in the 50s. The times he worked with (consensually or not) the X-Men because something bigger and scarier was after him. During one of the periods when Sabretooth and Logan are reluctant friends, or during a period when Sabretooth rips Logan’s sone apart and leaves his eviscerated corpse as a birthday card.
A character that’s 50, 60, 70 years old (Superman turned 88 this year, can you believe it?) being handled by a vast array of writers is not going to look identical at every moment of their arc. A game or a movie or even a television show is rarely ever going to have a chance to explore that entire arc, so they have to excise sections of it. And in that excision stuff’s going to get lost lost or rewritten. And it’s the execution of that excision that will determine how fans react.
So were I to condense all these pieces into something more unified: There is plenty to indicate to me that the narrative team collectively had a pretty nuanced and in-depth understanding of the IP and the characters they were writing. And because they were working in a pre-existing IP they didn’t have to do a lot of the world building. They could spend that time instead in the deeper interpersonal emotional beats. I also actually like that they took a lot of pre-existing lore elements and recontextualized them so they could do something new with them. For example, I think taking the mutate machine away from Magneto and giving it to Mr Sinister is a really great way to explore that storyline without just reheating the 2000 X-Men movie. What if Sentinels were used to create mutants instead of kill them? That’s genuinely cool concept.
But I also think they had a moment where they realized “oh crap we’re writing for IP. We need to hit the checklist.
It’s right at that reconciliation point of IP vs doing their own thing where the narrative of the game loses some of its momentum. And because that’s the intersection where the “well ackshually” crowd will dig in the most, what would otherwise just be bold creative choices gets catastrophized into “dogshit cringe writing” by the userbase.
That’s not the game’s fault, but they should have seen it coming. If you’re going to piss off the fans no matter what you do, might as well let Jean have her playable levels and give Callisto and Caliban more to do.
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Overall Playability
I personally did not experience any game breaking bugs or glitches. There were one or two times where I needed to stand in a specific spot to trigger Jean to do something, but all I had to do was move around a little bit.
I didn’t find the scent trail UI or the white traversal markers to be particularly overbearing. I generally stopped noticing them actively pretty quickly.
I’ve gotten more and more prone to motion sickness as I’ve gotten older, and this game did not set it off for me at all. I usually have to fiddle with camera speed, but for this I was fine out of the box. It was actually one of my primary complaints with Spider-Man 2 is that the traversal segments set off my motion sickness when that never happened in Spider-Man. It’s become a very inconsistent thing for me, so I’m always happy when I don’t have to fiddle too much.
There are a couple of boss fights where I feel as though they could have dollied the camera out a little more. And I would have liked the option for a more granular lock-on mechanism for switching between targets.
Overall, though, I found it to be a pretty straightforward, physically accessible gaming experience. I am in the phase of my life where I am not necessarily looking for big open-world games all the time, and so I had no issue with the linearity.
Combat
I am famously terrible at parrying and dodging. I cannot play FromSoft games. I’m not great at technical fighters. I have to really lock-in for side-scrolling brawlers. The last two Spider-Man games I had to spend a lot of time getting those I-frame specific moves correct.
In this game, when I was fiddling with the settings, I saw one that made that dodge and parry window longer. So I played with that longer window until I had nailed the timing (first or second mission) then switched to the normal window. By the time I got to the first boss where that timing really mattered, I was fine. So that was actually really nice to be able to adequately nail parrying and dodging like 95% of the time without having to sweat it too hard. So whatever was in the sauce to make that happen were the exact ingredients I needed.
I think I would have liked more direct interactions with Jean in terms of how the combat worked when she was with me. I felt the same way in the second Spider-Man game. Like here I’m teaming up with Miles or Yuri, but you’re not actually interacting directly except these little finishers.
I also really like stealth combat, and so in my ideal game there would have been a little bit more of a robust system for that. Maybe something where Jean can create little distractions beyond the migraine mechanic. At the same time, it is Wolverine, and he’s not exactly known for being low key. So it’s it’s not a game killer for me.
I also think I would have liked the Berserker rage to do a little bit more. Not entirely sure what, but it needed a punch.
Overall, though, I found the combat to be exceedingly satisfying. I feel as though they introduced new mobs at a pretty good pace. There was enough variety to keep things interesting as the game progressed, but they weren’t constantly introducing something new that you had to learn. It built on itself well, I would say.
QTEs
I’m addressing this specifically because I feel like it is a hot button issue. First, there is a toggleable auto complete option for quicktime events. I don’t know when it got patched in. I don’t know which reviewers had access to it. There’s actually a couple different things that can happen in terms of failing the quicktime event. Sometimes nothing is different. Sometimes if you don’t do the event, the game won’t proceed. Sometimes it’s just a matter of the scene unfolding a little differently. And towards the end there are quicktime events that you can straight up fail, leading to a death screen.
I personally hate quicktime events and wish we would stop doing them at all. I think they slow things down in an otherwise action heavy game. If I wanted to fail an FMV visual novel, I would just played Dragon’s lair. But I also understand the game development philosophy that causes them to continue to persist. So for me, personally, this felt like an acceptable compromise. I didn’t actually have to do them if I didn’t want to. I know a lot of other people aren’t going to feel the same way, and that’s fine. But that is an alternate perspective I haven’t really seen out there that happens to be mine.
Visuals, Acting, and Character Designs
No notes. Got my short king Wolverine, and I put him in a pearl snap shirt and cowboy hat first chance I got. Jean got a lovely Ms. Marvel inspired evening gown. I found most of the facial acting to be perfectly fine to great depending on the scene. There’s this little sniff sniff expression that Logan does that I loved every single time. If I had to make any changes to the cosmetics, it’d be either knock off one of the yellow suits or knock off the black tank top suit and replace it with either a yukata or a kimono. I just think that would have been fun.
In general I had a hell of a good time, but I don’t know when/if I’ll open up NG+ any time soon.
